Whatever Remains
by Catherine Wheels
Summary: It was always you, Russia, moving back and forth in the soap bubbles of my mind. I loved you, but I didn't leave you. -Russia/China. Stream of consciousness-


_A/N: Wow, this is cliche. Gag me with a spoon. And yet... I tried to write serious Russia/China where they were both males, and this is all that happened. There were three different starts... and in the end, this is what came out. Weirdly enough, I think I ripped most of it off of some poetry that my significant other wrote to their ex. Oops._

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It was you, Russia, that I loved. But it wasn't you that I left. You, who floated in chaos in and out of my consciousness like the wars I endured. A child at first moldable in my hands with your violet eyes and bright smile, throwing rocks at birds and bursting into tears, you were my favorite. And then you were gone.

I found you, much later, wanted to hold you. But I couldn't touch you. You reviled from me, terrified of the slightest sound. Creaking floorboards caused you to rise up screaming from your bed, ripping at your hair and skin. Your sisters held you in their arms and told you to calm down, that just because you had been invaded once doesn't mean it would happen again. They told me to leave, that they could take care of you. I believed them.

That was the first and only time I left you. You, as I knew you. If you want to hate me for leaving you, you can. But you must cite that time as the only time I abandoned you when you were truly in need. When I was turned away from you by your sisters. You can hate me, but you must also hate them.

It was a long time coming until I saw you again. You, with that frantic, terrified look I had seen on your face when you were younger. You said there was a storm brewing, that you could feel it in your bones, that General Winter wouldn't help you win this war. I found it hard to believe he'd ever helped you, anyway. The one time I met him, when I was in Canada's nation looking out for my people, he had a smug grin and dead eyes. He liked suffering. A trait he passed on to you. I remember the way you tormented the others, wrung their wrists until they bled.

After that storm, you were different. You had ripped your skin off and put a new coat on, painted yourself red and divided the money between yourself and your people. I saw your sisters. Ukraine, starved and sickly, and Belarus cold and trembling. I saw you picking sunflowers in the sun with your darkness radiating from you. And I couldn't bring myself to speak.

During the Second World War, I was close to you, or… what I thought was you. You would come home bloody, but smiling blissfully. You would take me in your hands and kiss me and tell me how much you had missed me, how we'd never be apart again. I nearly fell for it. But I saw your housekeepers with bruises that I know were not simply from the battles. I was never as stupid as you assumed I was.

I never knew you to be persuasive, but when the war was over, and I was too broken to resist, you came to me with a certain look in your eye. I couldn't place it, but you meant business, as they say. You took me in your hands again, and this time really took me. You gave me your philosophies and so much pleasure I was blinded by you. You were like a train, barreling down the tracks with thoughtless ideologue words and the power to put yourself into me, to make me feel weak until I simply opened my legs and accepted you.

You looked like yourself in the mornings, curled up against me with your childish face. And at times, I saw you during meals. But most of the time, you were not you. You are not you. You go in and out of yourself like you're some kind of convenient store, where you can pick up sanity on the off chance you need it. Usually, you think you're good without it. Like it's some kind of optional supplement to your daily life that maybe you aren't getting enough of, but you can live without. Well, the rest of us can't. And the rest of us can't live with you living the way you do.

You should probably know the truth.

You hate to hear this, but you know it's true: you are going to fall in on yourself. You are no longer a train, a bear, a symbol of power. The hammer and sickle never did work for you. You run from work, begging for someone to take care of you. Enough. It won't be me. I am not your plaything, parroting back your words so pretty to you. I am not your release, spreading my legs and letting you suck me whenever you feel like. I am not swayed by your imperialist tinted life view and I am not stupid enough to believe that we can continue.

Yes, imperialism. You are an aged empire with the heart of a little boy. A little boy too terribly enamored with his communist painted toy that is broken under the shine. Like a drowning man clutching at straws you lung forward at me to be your life-raft, to be the garment you adorn yourself in winter to keep you warm. Your General never did give you warmth, did he? Tell me what he did to you, dear. Did he strip you of your coat and scarf, force you to wander in the snow until you knew what it meant to be strong? Beat you when you cried? Cut jagged lines into your back until you expressed gratitude? The same as you did for the others?

I love you, and it wasn't you I left.

You pulled my hair on my way out the door, spat at my back, and screamed. A proper temper tantrum like a four year old might throw in my honor. I wondered if you were as removed from your body as I was, watching the whole scene play out in slow motion, thinking "this is the way the world ends," the way that England always says, "not with a bang but a whimper." But no. You were probably fully alert, in some kind of hyper tunnel vision, trying to beat me down into staying with you. I almost wish I had, if only to quiet you, to once again display the control I know I had over you. Have. If I wanted you, I could have you in a heartbeat.

I knew you when you were young, and I loved you then. The kind of love that didn't need to hide under your sheets or be bound to the headboard of the bed. You brought me flowers and I taught you, or I thought I taught you, respect for the world around you.

I left you when you were young, when your sisters turned me away. With a heart heavy enough to drown me had I jumped into a lake, I went. And I left again when you were grown, but you were not you. You were so distorted, covered in new ideas and old clothes, screaming like you were still young, but you weren't. You weren't even you.

And for as bad as I feel about what happened to you, I didn't leave you. I left…

Whatever was left of you.

If anything was left.


End file.
